to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants

cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may

not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a

scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live

in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or

railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,

except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and

the clipped andlimited literature thatsatisfied theirsouls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and

undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great

new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;

stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one

possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my

father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.

The whole of Bromstead as Iremember it, and as Isaw it last-it is

a year ago now-is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an

immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the

builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old

fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless

contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle

slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another

across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now

quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the

railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and

there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass,

advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike

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